Analysis - Why must badgers die?
Tuesday 21 November 2000
The Government is breaking its own laws and is slaughtering
badgers to see if they carry bovine TB. Is this justified? Simon
Barnes reports
If you are powerful, you make enemies. So it is
inevitable that Britain’s most powerful carnivores have people
queueing up to slaughter them: for self-protection, from a sense of
virtue, for good old-fashioned fun.
Badgers have made powerful enemies.
Although the animal is protected, the Government has waived its
own law in order to carry out an experiment in badger-killing, and
last week a select committee from the Ministry of Agriculture,
Fisheries and Food met to discuss what it had learnt from
slaughtering badgers.
But badgers are not without friends. Also last week, four people
who took action to help badgers in Herefordshire were found guilty
of criminal damage, establishing a legal precedent that opens the
way to further prosecutions of badger-helpers.
The badger’s unmistakable mask is the logo of the Wildlife
Trusts, the national umbrella organisation for all the county
wildlife trusts. But right now, badgers are short of friends in
positions of power and influence.
It has long been believed - but never proven - that badgers are
carriers of bovine tuberculosis. And bovine TB is not a minor
inconvenience for a farmer, but a herd-slaughtering disaster.
Farmers want action: and governments are always very keen to be
seen to be doing something. That is why the Government is breaking
its own laws and killing badgers in selected areas. The results are
being monitored. But not everyone is convinced by the usefulness - or even the rationality
- of this process.
For badgers have become a cause of war: yet more bad vibes in the
town/country and conservation/agribusiness debates. The views are
not quite polarised: among the non-hardliners of both sides there is
an overlapping sympathy.
But the gut feeling on the pro-badger side of the fence is that
badgers are being killed not because it is good for cows but because
it is good for governments. It is keeping the farmers quiet.
Farmers, the gut-feeling goes, want something to blame and
something to be done. Badgers fit the bill to perfection: a pile of
badger corpses couldn’t be better evidence that the Government is
listening to farmers, and not to sentimental townies.
The snag is that there is, as yet, no real evidence of a link
between badger presence and TB outbreaks. John Cousins, the director
of agricultural policy for the Wildlife Trusts, says: “We would
probably feel that there were other things that deserved more
attention.”
That is to say, disease prevention: higher standards of hygiene
on farms, higher standards of animal welfare, greater control of
cattle movement and isolation of herds.
But these are boring and lack the satisfying sleeves-rolled-up
drama of the cull. Cousins is sympathetic to farmers: after all, he
is one himself. “There is no doubt that badgers cost farmers money:
their digging is tremendously destructive, and farmers regularly
lose lambs that fall into setts. I know of one farmer who has 40
setts on 400 acres.”
He has nine setts on his own land - and a floodlit hide. And
there are farmers who have set up pay-per-view badger hides on their
land: as profitable a piece of diversification as any in an industry
in which diversification is the buzzword of buzzwords.
...
Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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Dec 2000
